Dealing with the snow by being inactive as possible.

Ever since I put up the bird feeders (and even before that) I’ve been trying to get good shots of the cardinal.  With my Sigma 120-400mm and some patience I was finally able to succeed.  These guys are really skittish.  If I come outside when I see them, they run away.  So I need to already be standing out there for them to ignore me and come out and let me take their photo.  This photo has been increasing in views rather quickly.  I’m a pretty big fan of it myself.

This is from last weekend.

It’s been nearly a month since I put up the bird feeders in our house and I have been enjoying them nearly every day since then.  In fact, the only negative has been the cost of bird food.  But, as my mother-in-law put it, I get the benefits of having birds without the hassle of having them as pets.  At first we had a few birds visiting the feeders each day.  Now, during the busy bird breakfast hours, we get multiple birds at once.  Interestingly, on the whole, the birds to not fight with each other.  Rather, if there are more birds than spots at the feeder, they will queue up on nearby branches.  I was very surprised by this behaviour because I thought they would surely fight over this nearly infinite food source.

Almost since we moved into our house we’ve been fascinated by the birds we have seen in our front and back yards.  Both the wife and I love birding in general and I love photographing birds.  So, after a bit of discussion we decided to get a bird feeder.  We ended up getting two of them to accommodate different birds and different seed types.  Then I dug a hole and attached the bird feeders to a stick we had in the garage.  I read a few books on birds and expected it might take a while for the birds to discover the feeder.  I was extremely delighted the following day to find birds at the feeder when I got home from work!  These little guys would flit out of the woods, peck a bite, and fly right back out.  So it was very hard to get a photo, especially with the sun beginning to set.  At the end of this post is the best shot I got.

Going over photos that were moving from one views group to another on flickr, I discovered this photo that I really love.  I love how his head is cocked, I love the idea of a bird with a built-in shovel, and I love how sharp the photo came out.

A while back in time (but only two posts ago) I wrote about my first bike ride on the BWI trail. A few days later I got an email on Facebook:

My name is Marty and I happened along your BLOG about biking at the BWI trail. My first time riding the trail was Saturday June 20th and I had the same incident with the bird. Not sure if we did the loop the same way but I was going pretty fast when the bird hit me. It was my first ride in about 10 years, no helmet and I was going pretty fast …………. THOUGHT I WAS GOING TO LOSE IT!!!